


The Lies Hermione Tells

by SparringWoodpecker



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, after war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 05:45:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21230771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SparringWoodpecker/pseuds/SparringWoodpecker
Summary: After the war, the ministry retrieves Hermione's parents from Australia and she is forced to come to terms with the lies she has told them over the years.





	The Lies Hermione Tells

The room was packed tight with secrets. They clung to the air, and sat on the table, only strengthening the barrier between Hermione and her parents.

No one had spoken in an hour, a mixture of not knowing what to say and not knowing how to say it.

They looked good. Sunkissed and stern faced.

Hermione bent her head, running through her mind snippets of a speech she hadn’t ever anticipated making. She never believed she would see her parents again. She hadn’t even held out much hope that the war would ever end. That Harry could truly succeed. It had all seemed so… insurmountable as they had crashed around the British countryside with no connection to the outside world and no idea what to do next.

It was not a notion she would ever let Harry become aware of. Her faith in him had always been outwardly resolute, and it would continue to be. This was just another secret. One to add to the many that pounded against her brain, begging to spill from her lips in a jangled mess.

A deep breath. She had to start somewhere.

“How was Australia?”

“How was–?” Mr Granger started angrily.

Mrs Granger placed a hand on his thigh. It did not go unnoticed by their daughter. “Australia was… unexpected,” she said cautiously.

“Australia was necessary,” Hermione responded. “There was a war.”

“A war?” Mr Granger asked. “There hasn’t been a war.”

“A wizarding war.”

“You said the wizarding world was safe,” Mrs Granger said, eyes wide.

The first lie of many.

_Hermione had elected young that there were things she needn’t trouble her parents with._

_The books she had found that had explicit content._

_The weird looks and nasty comments she got at school for always having the answer._

_The way the medical textbooks in her father’s study seemed to float down to her._

_When it came to the wizarding world, it was no different._

_Her first lie had been prompted by the moving staircases and the warning over the trick step, which she witnessed a boy sink down into. Had she known both of those would be the least of her worries during her time at Hogwarts, perhaps she would have felt less guilty about her first lie. As it was, as her first, it weighed on her heavy._

_And they wouldn’t stop coming._

Hermione continued “A dark wizard returned. Voldemort. The man who murdered Harry’s parents.”

“Harry’s parents were murdered?”

Another lie.

_When she first started Hogwarts, due to a lack of owl, Hermione managed to drag out writing home until she had friends._

_She told her parents about Ron, the youngest son of a wizarding family. And about Harry, an orphan boy who grew up with muggle relatives. She never elaborated on how his parents died. Instead telling them all about this weird game played on broomsticks that they both were obsessed with. Harry even played for the house team. They’d won the last match. She was trying to learn the rules for them. She had waxed poetic about the library._

_She hadn’t mentioned the troll. The break-in at Gringotts. The illegal dragon they’d smuggled off school grounds. The detention in the forbidden forest. She had made the decision not to mention her welcome, or lack thereof, in the wizarding world. There was little her parents could do, and their platitudes were pointless. There was even less point to telling them of You-Know-Who. They would, of course, not know who, and she did not need to worry them when she was in the same castle as Professor Dumbledore._

“I knew you weren’t safe.”

“Why wouldn’t we be safe? Wizards have nothing to do with Mugs.”

“Muggles, Dad. And we’ve lived alongside each other for centuries. But there’s always been prejudice. Muggles against wizards. Wizards against muggles.”

Mrs Granger’s eyes watered as she whispered in sudden understanding “Wizard against muggleborn.”

A nod acknowledged a further lie.

_Hermione’s parents could never be immersed in her life, and she was never more grateful for that than when at the start of her second year, Mrs Weasley sent her son a Howler. She was sure that there was a certain amount that Ron managed to conceal from his mother, but what he could not, would have driven Hermione’s parents to question her involvement at Hogwarts._

_She set herself to creating a web of exaggerations, of patch-working together the best of magic, the most wondrous. The cracks, she carefully papered over with fragments of truth, pieces of what she had seen, where she had been, little of the dangerous feats involved. Adding time where it had been lost._

_The end of her second year was explained away with a stress-induced illness. Her parents took her on holiday to France._

“Voldemort was after Harry. He knew that Ron and I are his friends. I couldn’t put you at risk because of my friendship with Harry. Not after seeing what his supporters did to a muggle family at the Quidditch World Cup. They tormented them, tortured them, for fun. Just for being muggles. I couldn’t let that happen to you.”

The truth was beginning to flow more easily now, the list of revelations that had yet to be made becoming clearer, more solid as she went.

_Third year, Hermione found that lying to her parents had created an unpleasantly good foundation for lying to her friends. It seemed that every sentence she spoke was a lie. The correspondence between herself and her parents focused on her overbearing workload, how fascinating everything was, how dumb divination was, how stupid Ron was. Never a word breathed of Sirius Black. Never once did she let them know he was a wizard. Never once did she let them know he was after Harry. Or that he wasn’t._

“So you just wiped our minds? No regard for how we felt.” Mr Granger blustered.

“He’d just killed a boy!” Hermione could picture his body, lying on the grass with the fading sound of applause. “He instrumented a highly dangerous tournament and forced Harry to participate, all so that at the end of it he could lure him off Hogwarts grounds to steal his blood and return. Only Diggory went with Harry – and he never came back. He was seventeen! It could have been Harry, or Fleur, or Viktor. It was Lavender, Fred, Colin, Tonks, Remus, Sirius, Dobby, Dumbledore, Mad-Eye, and so many more.”

Hermione lowered her head onto her arms, tears falling freely.

There was a moment of shock when her parents didn’t know how to react. There was a hole in their memories created by time rather than spell as to the last occasion they had seen their daughter cry.

Slowly, Mrs Granger reached out, and rubbed a firm hand along Hermione’s quaking back.

“We didn’t realise,” she said carefully. “I thought you were being hyperbolic to excuse yourself for what you did to us.”

Hermione let out a dry laugh. She hadn’t even been aware that that was still a secret.

_Fourth year Hermione had barely contacted her parents. It had been so confusing and so hard to find the words to establish a narrative of a lie when her whole world seemed to revolve around the tournament and who put Harry’s name in the goblet, and the embarrassment about Viktor and the Yule Ball and Ron’s behaviour and all that and everything had been so confusing and there just wasn’t space to think._

_It had almost been a sickening kind of relief when he had returned. That she wouldn’t find herself interrogated by her parents._

“How did you…?” Mr Granger threw a look to the mirrored wall.

Beyond the mirror, Hermione knew the ministry were watching. She chose her words carefully. “At the beginning of the summer, just before I turned sixteen, I took you to Diagon Alley, and there wiped and reconfigured your memories, before pushing you out into Muggle London. All trace of my underage magic was lost in the magical presence of Diagon Alley.” Hermione straightened her back, almost aware of the eyes that were boring into it.

Another secret unveiled.

She nodded to the mirror, gracefully accepting whatever they may decide to do. It mattered little to her now that her mind was free of the prison of her guilt. She smiled at the irony as Umbridge’s cruelly inflicted words floated back to her. I must not tell lies. When the lies had saved her family, she would lie over and over again. When she had flouted the decree for the restriction of underage magic outside the parameters set for acts of war, she would patiently await the verdict of whether it was deemed necessary or not. Though she suspected Amelia Bones would find a loophole. For now, she would content herself with unburdening her soul of the weight of secrets, of revealing it all to her parents. Away from the ministry. For the first time in three years, home.

**Author's Note:**

> Personally I enjoy the theory that Hermione obliviated her parents as soon as Voldemort returned, even though there are some flaws in that theory. So I try to dodge them in this fic.


End file.
